Introduction: New York City in Transformation (original) (raw)

2016

New York is the city that once was called by Rem Koolhaas- the urban laboratory with a distinctive ability of implementing innovative solutions to meet its development challenges. That was years before the explosion of the Asian megacities, when New York had to face the problems of the rapid growth of its population together with the uncontrolled urbanization. Continuing of having an ambition to be the world's most dynamic urban economy New York is also set to be the city of choice where families, businesses, and neighborhoods thrive. From the New York City's priorities of being the world's capital of capitalism and the global city – nowadays there are visible changes in planning for the city growth. The main focus of the urban policies is ensuring quality of life for generations of New Yorkers to come and one of the goals of the New York City`s strategic plan for the future is to be a strong and just city. At the same time, its diverse neighborhoods with their own disti...

Introduction. After the Urban Crisis: New York and the Rise of Inequality

Journal of Urban History, 2017

The introduction to this special section argues that the deconstruction of the city’s municipal social democracy was overdetermined by shifts in the global political economy toward increased income inequality and the depoliticization of national economic management. The city’s creditors forced it into an ideologically-motivated program of market discipline that cut its operating budget as the city’s economy financialized, defined by Greta Krippner as “the tendency for profit making in the economy to occur increasingly through financial channels rather than through productive activities.” The city’s leaders believed that their program would revive the city for the middle class. But financialization exacerbated income inequality. In 1970, the top 0.01 percent of earners made fifty times the average income; by 1998, that figure had increased to 250 times the average income. In 2013 Mayor Michael Bloomberg commented that: “If we could get every billionaire around the world to move here, it would be a godsend that would create a much bigger income gap,” which, he argued, was good for the whole city, because it would raise its tax base. The four articles of this section are part of a new and growing body of historical works about New York City since the 1970s that challenge the linear narratives of concepts such as neoliberalism, gentrification, public space, law and order, and resistance by reviewing how ordinary New Yorkers coped with declining infrastructure, services, standards of living, and increasing inequality.

New York Revisited (1992)

New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015

What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to

First we take Manhattan: la destrucción creativa de las ciudades

2016

En los sesenta algunos barrios de Manhattan se habian convertido en paisajes desolados y, cincuenta anos mas tarde, los pisos construidos ahi son los mas caros del mundo. Aunque parezca sorprendente, este no es un fenomeno exclusivo de Nueva York. Uno tras otro, los centros urbanos de todo el mundo han ido cambiado. Donde habia comercios tradicionales ahora se amontonan tiendas alternativas y donde vivian las personas mas excluidas ahora se congregan artistas y ejecutivos. Ante estos cambios, algunos hablan de regeneracion urbana y otros, en cambio, lo llaman gentrificacion. Mientras los primeros celebran un renacer urbano, los segundos denuncian la venta de la ciudad. A traves de este paseo por barrios como Malasana, Belleville, El Raval, el Bronx o Lavapies se conoceran las claves para entender las ciudades y los principales argumentos para transformarlas. El libro toma su titulo del estribillo de una de las canciones mas famosas del cantante Leonard Cohen : �(I'm guided by th...

Reshaping New York's Landscape

Journal of Urban History, 2021

Review of Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square by Stephen Petrus. "Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight," observes the narrator Julius in Teju Cole's meditative novel Open City (2011), largely set in New York. Cole reminds us that the city is a tapestry, made up of distinct yet intertwined localities, each a springboard for reflection, a world unto itself. In Open City, the built environment is a text with many layers of meaning and levels of complexity. New York City is at bottom a palimpsest. These three books echo Julius' views that New York neighborhoods are unique entities and that both the quotidian and the extraordinary are worthy of historical examination. Each writer probes a specific place to illuminate broader trends in urban history. In Design for the Crowd, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury analyzes the many incarnations of Union Square Park from its origins in the 1830s as the center of an elite residential enclave to its reemergence in the 1980s and 1990s as a shopping and entertainment destination. Merwood-Salisbury views the public-private relationships that remade the Square following the fiscal crisis of 1975 as but the latest chapter in its long history of civic-business alliances and is critical of commentary that decries the "privatization of public space." Jeffrey S. Gurock's Parkchester traces the history of a planned community established by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (Met Life) in 1940, from an ethnically mixed though racially segregated development to a diverse neighborhood reflective of the Bronx's demographics in the twenty-first century. Gurock focuses on harmonious relations among white ethnics in the 1940s and the 1950s and relative racial accord following the integration of Parkchester in the 1960s. And in Tudor City, Lawrence R. Samuel assesses the first residential skyscraper complex in the world, from its creation by real estate developer Fred F. French in the 1920s to the battles over the site between developers and preservationists in the 1970s and 1980s. Samuel depicts Tudor City as a largely self-sustaining community, marked by a strong identity and wariness to outside forces perceived as a threat. Union Square, Parkchester, and Tudor City all reshaped New York's landscape and at their origins represented a fresh set of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes about city living. Merwood-Salisbury 953401J UHXXX10.